Etherwalker (7 page)

The armor-clad man was larger than even Master Gershom had been, his thick arms crossed over a broad chest. As imposing a sight as he was, however, it was the woman that held Enoch’s attention, for at a glance it was obvious that she was the owner of the frozen voice. Long white hair hung straight, framing a pale and beautiful face. The red cloak which draped her body could not hide the stately form beneath, and her pose alternated from graceful to predatory.

But the eyes were what startled Enoch out of his reverie. They had no iris, no color; just a single black pinpoint in the middle of glaring whiteness.

The angry man would not be interrupted. He waved Enoch’s captor off with a hiss and turned back to the woman.

“Milady, few enough caravans come by this way anymore, and those that do are usually Kingsmen. We can’t live off that! I don’t care what you say; I’m taking my men and going up north to raid. We’ll draft some new boys and get strong. Get fat. Then we’ll come back here to wait for your prey!”

The woman slowly turned toward him and smiled.

“My men, Nibat.
My
men will stay here. How can you expect to raid a northern village if you cannot even stop a caravan of slaves?”

The question curled in the air. Nibat boiled over, sputtering.

“I already told Milady that they was royal-trained, and on murback. A normal caravan we could’ve stopped, but they was royal-trained, I tell you!”

“Two men against six, Nibat.
Six!
”

That did it. With a roar, Nibat lunged at the woman, grabbing for her throat. Enoch shut his eyes, expecting at any time to hear the snapping of slender bones. He felt his captor’s arm grow tight around his middle, and he opened his eyes.

The woman still lived. She held two slim, silver daggers—pointed down, pinning Nibat’s hands to the table. The large man had been forced to his knees, his eyes staring widely at the blades sprouting from the skin between his fingers. A serpentine smile curled the woman’s lips.

“Sweet idiots, you plainsmen. I was drinking men’s blood when your mother’s mother first drank milk.”

Nibat’s eyes slowly lifted from his hands to the woman’s face, and he spat.

“
Bruja
!”

The woman sighed and leaned back, bored.

“Now, Nibat, I will tell you what to do and you will listen, or I will find something softer to bury my knives in. Are you listening?”

Nibat growled and looked down at his bleeding hands. He nodded.

“Good. You and your band of brigands will remain here. You will not question my authority again. I came here following rumors of a specter, but . . . something else is afoot.”

Enoch wondered at her strange speech, for the woman’s face was smooth, and she could not have been much more than a decade older than he was. She leaned over and pulled the blades from Nibat’s hands. He fell to the floor groaning.

“The Serpent has returned to this face of the world, and he works his sweet venom in the southlands. Do you know what that means, Nibat?” From the floor, Nibat’s moan quieted, and Enoch saw him pull a short knife from his boot.

“It means that the roads will soon be filled with refugees fleeing the storm. Easy prey for you and your vultures. Easy murder, easy money, and young farm girls for your entertainment. And when my sisters return for me, I can make you all captains and generals; no longer cutpurses and rogues, but minions of the Forked Tongue.”

As the woman spoke, Nibat’s face had switched from a mien of anger into sweaty greed and lust. But those last words gave him pause. Staggering to his feet, at what he presumed a safe distance from those silver daggers, Nibat lifted his knife in a bloody hand and growled.

“We may be cutpurses as you say, Milady, but a servant of the Snake I’ll never be.”

The smile on her face broadened almost imperceptibly.

“So you would die?”

He roared and leapt, knife raised high. She caught him mid-lunge, daggers flying from her hands to bury themselves in his eyes. His leap carried him over the top of the altar to crash lifelessly at the woman’s feet.

Nibat’s neck bent at an impossible angle, his face turned toward Enoch. The daggers reflected lamplight from his red-weeping sockets. Enoch shuddered.

The woman walked around to the side of the altar, retrieved her daggers, and, to Enoch’s horror, licked them clean before hiding them somewhere in her sleeves. The flickering light cast part of her perfect face into shadow, and for a moment Enoch thought he saw a cold blue light shine from her eye.

The woman motioned for his captor to approach, and with a grunt he carried Enoch into the room. At her signal, he was dumped unceremoniously onto the floor right next to the corpse’s feet. The man then placed Enoch’s swords on the altar and stepped back. She motioned him out without a word.

Now she was inspecting his master’s swords, a delicate furrow creasing her brow. Enoch dared not move. A woman who killed like this, who could predict what she would do next?

“You are young to travel the road at night. Why did you come here?”

Her voice froze Enoch to the ground. This
bruja
, or whatever she was, would not hesitate to sell him to the monsters who hunted him. Steeling his face into the
Ferrocara,
he prepared to lie.

He dropped his shoulders and looked down, hoping he looked the picture of frightened villager. He had seen the expression plenty of times in his visits to Rewn’s Fork. Voice trembling with what he hoped conveyed the proper amount of fear and misery: Enoch spoke of black beasts, a midnight attack, and his family farm burnt to ashes. Afraid to veer too far from the truth and get caught in his inventions, Enoch spoke of hiding in the trees as the creatures swept through Rewn’s Fork.

It sounded convincing to him.

Is all emotion just mimicking patterns witnessed from others?

The woman smirked.

“Do you think me a fool, manling? Telling me this nursemaid’s tale as though I were a frightened girl? You claim to be from the land of shepherds, and yet you carry the
derech
and the
iskeyar
.”

A dagger was suddenly in her hand.

“You will tell me how and why the Rift Queen sends a scrawny Nahuat apprentice to find me. What message do you bear? Speak, or die.”

Far from intimidating him, her words and his tale reminded him that he was far from helpless. His master had been preparing him. His master had been forging a weapon.

I killed blackspawn. I slew their beasts and burst their weapons.

The
litania eteria
slipped from his bruised lips, and he felt the familiar peace as his subconscious mind took over. The room came into sharp clarity. Somehow the woman sensed this change, and she stumbled backwards with a snarl. Her dagger gleamed in the fire light. In a heartbeat, Enoch was on his feet, and he noted her stance.

She moves quickly, and there is another dagger in the left sleeve.

Enoch’s mind measured distances and options as he stepped into the bent-kneed, loose stance of unarmed combat.

Distract. Delay. Disarm.

The woman’s smirk broadened into a grin.

“If you wish to die, then . . .”

She was cut off mid-sentence as Enoch’s stiff-fingered jab caught her square in the throat. As she staggered back, he slipped into the
semprelisto
stance. What should have been a crippling blow only stunned her, however, and a second later the dagger was slicing through the air toward his head. Enoch had already dropped to the ground and rolled away, coming up to his feet out of her reach.

She is not human.

The thought almost shook him from his trance, but he held on fiercely. The finger jab was a blow his master had taught him to use as a surprise advance. It was painful enough to down even the largest man and end a fight before it began. If done with enough force, it could crush the windpipe.

But Enoch had not felt the hollow crunch of a broken larynx like his master had described—his fingers had instead encountered solid cords of muscle. Muscle, and . . . something else. Something much more solid.

She chuckled at his hesitancy.

“I’m not the picture of feminine frailty you took me for, am I? Have you Northerners so soon forgotten the platabrujas? You no longer tell tales of the Serpent Wives? If you knew half our lore your heart would freeze and crack.”

Somewhere in the back of Enoch’s mind a memory surfaced of the Rewn’s Fork Patriarch, old Noach Kohn, telling ghost stories around the fire on Midwinter’s Eve. Yes, he remembered the tales—except according to Noach, the Serpent Wives were giant, iron-scaled women with fangs. They spat lightning and gorged on the flesh of disobedient children.

The real thing may have been less gaudy but was much more terrifying.

Hold on to the pensa spada.

After being hunted through the woods by coldmen and their spider-hounds, Enoch had hoped that he would not be so easily frightened. But now he confronted the subject of dimly-lit childhood horrors. Concentration slipped.

“You’ve been trained in the old ways, I see. There are not many who remember the mind path anymore. Who taught you?”

At the last word, she launched herself across the room toward him, hidden dagger flashing into her hand. He barely dodged her in time, rolling quickly to his right.

Her reflexes were quicker. A cold hand snapped around his ankle like a vise of frosty iron, and Enoch found himself being pulled under the empty smile. She had her dagger at his throat in a flash. She leaned over to kiss his forehead—the blessing of a Serpent Wife before sending her victim to hell.

The lips were ice on his brow, and Enoch felt no breath on his face. A voice at the back of his head commented,
she doesn’t even breathe.

Enoch opened his eyes and
paused
. He saw them. The glowing lines, the swirling motes of power and energy. They were hard to see, buried under the coat of flesh, but they were there. The whorls and sparks danced in a pattern more intricate than those in the windmill, even more than the coldman’s weapon. Enoch didn’t know where to push, if he could even interrupt the complex system woven through her skeleton. The woman’s dagger slid slowly across his neck, and warmth began to run down his chest.

In desperation, Enoch pushed with his mind. Pushed everywhere, twisting lines of force and stirring bright motes with frantic abandon.

The dagger stopped. A shudder passed through her, and then she was still. Enoch crawled out from under her dagger, hand to his neck to staunch the blood.

First a crackle, then a hiss came from the witch frozen at his feet.

“Ssss . . . an etherwalker . . . Ssstill alive!”

Enoch looked deeply and saw that the lines and motes he had pushed were rearranging themselves rapidly. Whatever he had done, the witch was repairing. A pale hand flexed spasmodically, and the hissing turned into a whine. Her dead eyes widened and in one swift movement, she lurched to her feet.

“You must be what the blackssspawn sssearch for. The Hunt! It sssearches for you.”

Enoch pushed again; the witch crumpled to the ground and was still. Still, but not dead—after a few heavy seconds of silence, a faint whirring sound whispered from her chest. Enoch decided to escape while he could.

Grabbing his swords, pulling them over his shoulder with one hand, he limped to the ragged door. His neck was still bleeding, although it had slowed—luckily her dagger had only cut through skin. Enoch’s ankle was numb where she had grabbed it. Peering through the thin cloth veil, he could just make out several forms striding toward him. The other thieves had heard the struggle and had come to investigate.

Enoch cast around frantically, desperate for an escape. At last he saw a collapsed hallway behind the altar. The sputtering copper lamp provided meager light, and it was difficult to see if he would be able to fit through the tumbled masonry. He lifted the lamp, and it dawned on him.

As the first thief lifted the veil to enter the temple, the lamp smashed into his face. Both veil and brigand burst into flame as the oil doused them, and the wind fanned the fire until it caught onto the few thieves unlucky enough to have crowded in behind him. It was enough of a distraction for Enoch to squeeze himself through the stones of the collapsed hallway unnoticed. Near the back, he found a crack large enough for him to slip through. And just like that he was outside the temple, with the sound of the shouting thieves behind him. He pulled his hand away from his neck and wiped the blood on his pant leg. The bleeding had slowed.

I did it! They’ll never find me in these ruins. I just need to put some distance between us.

Enoch’s confidence died as more thieves rounded the corner of the temple.

*  *  *  *

Rictus stirred from his dreamless sleep to the shouts of angry men. Cursing soundly, he rose from his tomb and decided to take a look at what had them so excited.

And at this time of night
they’re bound to wake the dead.

Rictus often joked with himself. Sure, he’d heard it all before, but as he was fond of telling himself, the commentary keeps away the crazy. Even stale commentary.